“It didn’t turn out too badly.” He caught her staring at him, shocked. “All right, if it makes you happy, I’ll give Teufel a chance to prove herself.”

“It will make me less unhappy, at least.”

“Anything for you, my love,” he said, sulkily. “Don’t you trust me?”

“It can be hard to trust men who stab their allies in the back.”

“I don’t plan to do it once a week!” he snapped. “Or ever again,” he added, hurriedly. He felt bad for Lord Marshal Forest. A good man, a good soldier. He felt bad, but there’d been no choice. And as a point of fact, he’d stabbed him in the front. “At Stoffenbeck I bloody dithered, and we bloody lost, and I swore I’d never let a moment slip past again. So I saw an opportunity and I grabbed it. For us. I thought you’d be pleased!”

The truth was she’d changed, and not for the better. He’d said his vows to someone who let no scruple get in her way. But then she’d said hers to a man who could fasten his own belt without help. That’s marriage. People change, and not always in the way you want, and you’re chained together anyway.

Leo took a breath as they reached the great doors, fabulously carved with food and drink and celebration, only slightly spoiled by a burned patch and a few axe marks. “We have to be united,” he said, wondering who he was trying to convince. “For the sake of the children. For the sake of the nation. Our marriage made sense. It still makes sense. It makes more sense than ever.”

Applause rang out as Savine swept into the Hall of Mirrors, wearing a radiant smile.

“Lord and Lady Brock!” bellowed Glaward, smashing his big hands together.

There were perhaps two hundred Representatives gathered there, standing up to clap from a mismatched array of seating scavenged from across the Agriont. Battered armchairs spilling stuffing, royal dining chairs and children’s schooling chairs, even a milking stool and one great curved bench somehow salvaged from the ruins of the Lords’ Round, scorched at one end.

Savine had not set foot in that building during Risinau’s reign, but even she could tell the balance of the Representatives had greatly changed since then. Less than half this crowd had been voted for, and those were mostly from the richer towns and districts. Landowners, merchants, men of business. The rest had all once been nobles. Members of the Open Council lucky and unprincipled enough to slip from one body to another. Now Leo had made them nobles again. There were even a few women, taking the places of fathers, brothers, husbands who had met their ends in the Great Change. On the front row, Lords Isher and Heugen gave their own continuing survival a standing ovation, heavy with the furs and chains of aristocracy they had so eagerly cast off.

Thousands of reflections applauded, too, of course. In places a broken mirror split a face into mismatched halves, or a shattered one smashed the world into a thousand distorted fragments. Smears of paint still clung in the corners where the slogans had been hastily scrubbed away. But then the Hall of Mirrors was a vast room. Putting it right would be the work of weeks. The palace? Years. The Agriont? Decades. The city of Adua? The Union as a whole? Could any of it really go back together?